Six Misfits Test Wits on Bigger Platform

In the long, exhausting reality show formerly known as life, which cannot be traversed with the aid of TiVo, there are peaks and there are valleys. Qualifying as traditional high points are weddings and children's birthdays, career triumphs, the day you bought those jeans that actually flatter. Adolescence, in its entirety, is generally considered prime valley material.

Certainly, the middle-school days must be dark for the six young misfits testing their wits in "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee," the effortlessly endearing new musical that opened on Broadway at Circle in the Square last night after a successful run Off Broadway at the Second Stage Theater.

William Barfee is saddled with a chronic sinus condition, a last name that invites pointed mispronunciation (it's supposed to rhyme with parfait, thank you), and a deluded belief that he looks O.K. in shorts. Marcy Park suffers from secret dismay at her own outrageous capability. Who really wants to speak six languages if you can't meet a boy in any of them? Then there's Logainne Schwartzandgrubenierre, perhaps the most abjectly afflicted: pigtails at an inappropriately advanced age, a mortifying lisp and two gay dads to boot.

And yet a taste of life's glory is not outside the reach of even these miniature eccentrics and their equally odd competitors: mousy Olive Ostrovsky, the permanently flushed Leaf Coneybear and Chip Tolentino, the Boy Scout who has just earned his badge for raging hormones. A trophy from a spelling bee may not carry the social cachet of the homecoming queen's tiara, but small victories are the best most of us can hope for in life, right?

In any case, it's the more private but enduring triumphs - the connection finally made with a member of the opposite sex, the discovery of previously unknown pockets of self-esteem - that are really being celebrated in "Spelling Bee," which itself has graduated with honors from the local competition to the divisional championships. The happy news for this happy-making little show is that the move to larger quarters has dissipated none of its quirky charm.

In fact, the musical has managed to make lemonade from one of Broadway's most lemony spaces. The dreary basement lobby of the Circle in the Square always has, come to think of it, resembled the cinderblock nightmare of a prefab junior high slapped together in the 1960's. Plastering it with peppy posters promoting the French club, and plaques commemorating the mock achievements of the show's creative team, the set designer Beowulf Boritt invests an antiseptic space with cheesy warmth. (Little James Lapine, now a big-shot Broadway director, got the Dewey Decimal Award from the Putnam Librarians Association.) The theater itself, with its rows of steeply raked seats arrayed like bleachers on three sides, has been cleverly transformed into a mock gymnasium, with a basketball court stenciled on a scuffed wooden floor.

Like much else about this lovingly hand-stitched musical, the atmospheric décor should be cute to the point of cloying, but somehow it isn't. Likewise, the recruitment of audience volunteers of all ages to join in the competition still inspires delighted chuckles and palpable suspense, not squirms of irritation. At the reviewed performance, when the last surviving civilian, a shy-looking tyke with shaggy hair, skipped a syllable or two in his last word, the audience slumped and sighed in unison.

Most crucially, the affectionate performances of the six actors burdened with the daunting challenge of inhabiting young souls have not been stretched into grotesque shape by the move to a large theater. Space doesn't permit me to celebrate them individually, as I probably should. But focus on any one of these talented performers, anxiously looking on as a competitor faces down a polysyllabic curveball, and you'll see the twitchy behavior of a real youngster, not actors self-consciously aping youthful mannerisms. Lisa Howard and Jay Reiss, meanwhile, who play the perky but unbending administrators of the bee, are no less skilled at finding the honorable qualities in more mature geekdom.

William Finn's score sounds plumper and more rewarding than it did Off Broadway. If it occasionally suggests a Saturday morning television cartoon set to music by Stephen Sondheim, that's not inappropriate. And Mr. Finn's more wistful songs provide a nice sprinkling of sugar to complement the sass in Rachel Sheinkin's zinger-filled book. Ms. Sheinkin sets off a new comic firecracker every time a contestant furrows a brow and asks to hear a word used in a sentence, in accordance with the rigid bee rules: "Sally's mother told her it was her cystitis that made her special."

As befits a detail-oriented past master of the Dewey Decimal System, in refitting "Spelling Bee" for a larger theater, Mr. Lapine has sharpened all the musical's elements without betraying its appealing modesty. "Spelling Bee" is not extravagant in its aims, but it lives up to its goals in a way that the season's bigger, glitzier and more ambitious musicals mostly don't. Gold stars all around!

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

Music and lyrics by William Finn; book by Rachel Sheinkin; conceived by Rebecca Feldman; additional material by Jay Reiss; based on "C-R-E-P-U-S-C-U-L-E," an original play by the Farm; directed by James Lapine; choreographed by Dan Knechtges; set design by Beowulf Boritt; costumes by Jennifer Caprio; lighting by Natasha Katz; sound by Dan Moses Schreier; orchestrations by Michael Starobin; music director, Vadim Feichtner; vocal arrangements, Carmel Dean; music coordinator, Michael Keller; production stage manager, Andrea (Spook) Testani; production manager, Kai Brothers; general management, 321 Theatrical Management. Presented by David Stone, James L. Nederlander, Barbara Whitman, Patrick Catullo, Barrington Stage Company and Second Stage Theater. At the Circle in the Square Theater, 254 West 50th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Running time: 1 hour and 45 minutes.